Chapter 48 #2
She swept close and knelt beside him, gripped his chin and made him look at her.
‘Let him go, darling. Do not make your last moments together more painful. You read the page I left for you, did you not? Beloved the oak, blood spilled for every layer of binding.’ She touched his cheek, eyes glimmering.
‘And you came back. Together, we can tear Khaim apart with our bare hands and burn the pieces.’
Meilyr clung to Osian. She was so, so much stronger than him. ‘Let him go—’
‘And you will come to the knife willingly? If I spare him, you will help me?’
‘Yes,’ he choked. ‘I will.’
‘No—’ Osian’s protest cut off in another twist of pain.
Demelza huffed a sad laugh and rubbed his cheek with her thumb. ‘Oh, Meilyr. I am so sorry.’
She really was. Even as she hauled him to his feet, away from Osian.
‘No!’
‘He is the king’s son, Meilyr. Even with a good heart, he cannot be allowed to live.’
‘Osian!’ Meilyr dug in his heels and drew the gwaed-steel dagger at his hip.
Demelza grabbed his wrist and twisted with practised cold. Agony shot up his arm, hot and sharp. His back hit a pillar as she shoved him, and the dagger clattered uselessly to the floor.
She fixed him there with one hand on his wrist, the other around his throat. ‘No need for that, is there. I know this hurts, but you have to let him go.’
He struggled, to no avail.
Behind her, Osian tried to reach for him. It broke his heart all over again.
‘You hide yourself so well, Meilyr.’ Her gaze was soft.
Sad. ‘You make yourself so small. I would never have known, were it not for the little signs only another gwehydd would recognise. Your way with food, how you hurt so vividly when that stag died on the hunt. The way the gardens listened for you, how expertly you saved Osian’s life from that poison.
I felt the blood move in you, from your own heart.
’ She moved aside the hair from his neck.
Her expression changed to something between pity and grief. ‘A parting gift…’
The bite-bruises Osian had left on his skin.
‘At least one of his last memories will be a pleasant one. Gods, how different we are, after all…’
Meilyr barely heard her. From his helpless, hopeless pain came perfect clarity.
He could still feel Osian. He could feel him more brilliantly than ever, the prince’s heartbeat threaded through his own.
He could reach him. He would.
‘Why now?’ he asked, to distract her. ‘You have been at court for years. Why now?’ Behind her back, he reached. Gripped. Drew back from the feeling of wrongness. Back towards the form he knew, intimately. The shape Osian’s flesh longed to return to.
‘I was waiting for another like myself, waiting for you. The last part – you saw, did you not? A gwehydd’s heart-blood. A sacrifice to the land, from one closest to it.’
There was less resistance now. Perhaps she was preoccupied, or thought pulling him away bodily had been enough.
He would save Osian.
‘How thankful I am for you, for us. Two wild things Khaim could not kill.’ She gripped the back of his neck and pulled his gaze to her. ‘I am so genuinely sorry it has to be this way. But you can help bring her back and wash away Khaim like a righteous flood. There is nothing better to die for.’
‘Her?’ It was hard to keep up, but at least she was talking. ‘Who?’
‘Who else?’ Her smile warmed. ‘She who was the first scapegoat Khaim used against us. She upon whose shoulders rested the Sundering.’
His confusion was genuine.
‘Oh, darling, you did not think I did this so dramatically just for fun? No, I want Cyngalon to know – I want all of them to know she will return. As sure as I am of the blood, as surely as we both are, she will rise again and sweep all of Khaim from our home and from this good earth like the gods themselves. Only then will we know peace.’
She believed every word with a conviction like no other.
‘And I need you, Meilyr.’ With another display of physical skill that would have rivalled most crownsworn, she pulled him from the pillar and tripped him flat onto his back on the harsh stone floor.
The air crashed from his lungs. ‘I need your strength and your beautiful, brilliant heart.’ She drew her own dagger, kneeling over him, sobered and pragmatic.
‘I need it to bleed for Cyngalon, not these monsters. I need you to bring her home, so at last we can be home, again.’ A bur of sadness as she straightened and pressed the gwaed-steel tip into the cloth beside his sternum.
‘I am sorry, Meilyr. I will make sure…’ She trailed off, stunned by something.
Osian’s sword burst through her chest. Her eyes shot wide and they both swayed, before Osian gripped her shoulder and pushed her aside, off the blade and away from Meilyr. The prince dropped to his knees beside him, shoulders bent.
Demelza’s blood hissed as she curled and writhed in agony. Bubbling red spread in a thick pool about her, staining her pale tunics.
Osian slumped sideways, and Meilyr scrambled up to hold him.
‘Osian – no, do not move, hold on.’ He steadied him in his arms, already at work.
The oak receded. Osian’s bones restitched themselves, withdrawing like folded wings inside his body. They both released a pained, jagged breath when it was done.
‘Meilyr…’
They pressed their foreheads together. Osian’s hand gripped the back of his head, fingers in his hair.
‘Aldreda,’ Meilyr said. He laid Osian down carefully and faltered as he rose, but made it to where she had collapsed beneath the dais.
There was enough of her blood spilled to weave a connection. It was still a far fiercer effort than with Osian, a more unfamiliar body and nature, but he was almost done when she grasped his wrist.
‘Our father…’
The king.
His chin had fallen, eyes hidden by the rim of his hawthorn crown and his white-gold hair. But something in him lived. Something held on.
There was not much at all left in Meilyr, and Demelza’s words burned. This was the king of Khaim. All he had done…
But Meilyr was already moving. Who was he to pass judgement? If he could save the life of Osian’s father, he would.
He stumbled on the way to the dais, trying to steady his breathing. The king did not stir as Meilyr leaned on the arm of the throne and thumbed some of the blood from the older man’s shoulder. The taste sickened him, but he got to work, fighting his own eyelids.
Hawthorn and bone retreated. His own blood was so loud, pitching sharply, threatening to drain his consciousness as though in warning.
The bang ricocheted as the Throne Room doors were thrown open.
Meilyr started and turned, in time to see Osian struggle to his feet, expression split in horror.
‘No—!’
The crownsworn acted in the only way they could. The bodies on the floor, the single figure standing alone before the near-dead king.
Their crossbows were familiar: gwaed-steel armour-piercers used to kill sorcerers.
The first bolt buried itself in Meilyr’s lower ribs. The second plunged straight through his heart.
Osian’s wordless roar ripped the hall apart.
‘Stand down!’ Aldreda shouted. ‘Gods – stand down!’
Meilyr put his hand to his wet chest and sank to his knees.
Osian caught him. Pulled him into his arms and against his chest. ‘Meilyr – no no no, Meilyr – no!’ He tried to touch the bolts with shaking hands but stopped.
Agony rolled across him like clouds over the mountains.
‘Get a healer!’ he cried, pulling Meilyr closer.
‘Meilyr – Meilyr, if I take these out, you can fix it? You can – you can fix this. You can fix this.’
Meilyr smiled brokenly. Gods, he wanted to. He wanted to prove him right, to spend another moment in the light of his eyes.
But there was so much damage. His heart was in tatters, blood spluttering frantic and then slow. Gasping around iron and wood. He did not even have the strength to try after the exhaustion the night had wrought.
There was too much damage. Iron in his mouth, slipping over his lips.
‘Meilyr, no, you have to – you have to…’
Osian.
His hair caught the rising sun, spun gold. His eyes were a depth no sea could match.
Gold from the dappled light, from the flames behind. Warmth as his hand caught Meilyr’s and pulled him away. Away from the death and the horror, through the trees.
Two children, led to one another by the fox in the wood.
Oh.
Meilyr’s mind finally came to the truth his heart had longed for.
Oh, of course.
‘You were the boy in the woods.’ He huffed a bloodied bubble of a laugh. That was how Osian had known the truth. ‘Of course you are. Of course you are…’
Osian was the boy the fox had led him to. The boy with golden hair who had run with him through the trees. The boy who had led him to Idwal, to Lowri. To Celyn.
The boy who had saved him. Who had never stopped saving him.
‘Meilyr – Meilyr…’
Meilyr grasped Osian’s bloodied hand as fiercely as he could. Those sea-storm eyes were at tempest. Beautiful. He was beautiful – and alive.
Alive.
There was no regret for the choice Meilyr had made to come back for him, even knowing how it would end.
He firmed his grip, swallowed and focused.
‘Live,’ he commanded. He pressed it through his hands and coursed it through Osian’s body with the final fragments of his strength – with his blood as it pooled beneath them.
Osian had to live. Celyn had to live. They all had to live.
‘Live.’
Devastation tore through Osian’s features, which was a shame. He really was most beautiful when he smiled.
‘Live,’ Meilyr told him. The memory of that smile made his lips quirk.
It was not a bad image to die to, really.
And Meilyr did die. There, in Osian’s arms, on the stones of the Throne Room floor.